EmmonsNet

It's Independence Day here in the United States. All you US citizens who are looking to celebrate and have a good time, please be smart about it.

I know it's hard for those of you are Darwin Award hopefuls to resist the temptation, but try the best you can not to becomd a statistic today. Use some commen sense and fireworks safety.

I get a lot of junk sent to me by friends via email. Chain letters, jokes, those crappy and hardly ever humorous DIY 'inspirational' posters, etc. But earlier today a friend sent me the link to Kinetic Sketch. This has got to be one of the funnest and most beautiful time wasters on the web that I have seen to date.

It is a very clever flash application that lets visitors create some really quick and interesting pieces of abstract art.

The image above is something I produced in about thirty seconds. I don't think it will auction for millions of dollars anytime soon, but I do think it's pretty.

I just cranked out a plugin for Joomla that uses the AddToAny Social Bookmarking API.

I felt a lot of the other social bookmarking plugins / extensions for Joomla were too heavy for something that should be really simple. So, I said 'Frack it!' and wrote my own.

Since it took me less than three hours to put together and test on my development web server at my home office, it's deployment here on EmmonsNet is the first test of what I consider to be its beta test.

For a demo of this plugin, just check the bottom of this article or any other article here at EmmonsNet.

A quick list of the AddToAny API features that it supports are:

• 'Show Page Title' - passes the page title as well as the URL to the social bookmarking service.
• 'Number Of Bookmarking Services' - set the number of bookmarking service icons visible.
• 'Hide Intersecting Flash' - if this is enabled, it should hide flash elements on the page that it overlaps.
• 'Official Feed E-Mailer' - the URL of the site feed (still working on the Subscribe Widget. That's comming soon!).
• Section and Category Filtering - can disable this plugin for chosen sections and categories.
• Alignment - control how the AddToAny widget aligns at the bottom of the article.
• Button Size - can choose from five different Button / Widget sizes.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) is showing that another tropical depression has formed just south of the Gulf Of Mexico. While this one is not terribly organized, it still manages to dump some rain on western Cuba and the eastern shores of the Yucatan. Meteoroligists at the NHC are giving this system between a 30 to 50 percent chance of becoming a tropicle cyclone within the next forty-eight hours.

Once it moves into the southern Gulf Of Mexico, conditions may be more favorable for this system to become more organized.

If it does turn into a tropical storm or hurrican after entering the gulf, I hope all of you residents of the gulf coast have your hurricane preparedness supplies and plans ready.

UPDATE (2009-06-28): The NHC has announced that this system has lost some of its 'oomf', and now has less than a 30% chance of developing into a tropical cyclone within the next 48 hours.

UPDATE (2009-06-29): This system degraded to nothing last night.

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